The last week of October, 1995 marked the opening of the Denver Museum of Natural History's new permanent exhibit on the prehistory of life on Earth, Prehistoric Journey.

This exhibit includes extensive sound components. Each of the walkthrough environments is a sonic as well as a visual experience. My partner James Reeve and I created the sound design and sound system in collaboration with exhibit designer Charles Stirum and technical audio consultant Michael Stocker.

    -Jeremiah Moore
    October 27, 1995
    Denver, Colorado



Prehistoric Journey is really quite large, and contains a wealth of information on the history of life; loads of beautifully prepared and mounted fossils, interactive computer displays which show the movement of the continents over the eons, walkthrough recreations of prehistoric environments. The entire exhibit presents current ideas in exhibit design - the idea of immersing the visitor in a sensory environment, the idea of making the displays more interactive and involving, the idea of having artists and scientists collaborating to form a whole which is both inspiring and factual, where form and content work well together to communicate meaning on many levels. Seven years in the making, Prehistoric Journey is the most ambitious exhibition ever produced at the Denver Museum of Natural History. What follows is a description of the "Envioramas," recreations of prehistoric environments in three dimensions, which the visitor walks through.

Prehistoric Journey takes the visitor on a journey in time, from the beginnings of life on Earth, to the appearance of the first humans. As we travel through the exhibit, we also travel forward in time.

Entering, we find ourselves underwater, in the oceans with the earliest forms of life. Waves are breaking overhead, as the sounds of early life teem around us.

As life begins to creep up onto land, more complex forms begin to proliferate. We find ourselves overlooking the coast of Kansas, 120 Million years ago when there was an ocean there. The ocean waves thunder in the distance, as lizards and giant dragonflies play in the foreground.

Continuing on, we enter the Cretaceous period, the age of the dinosaurs. We find ourselves in the middle of a deep forest, 65 million years ago, with a stream running through it. The head of a triceratops lies rotting in the stream, a future fossil, perhaps. Two six foot tall male dinosaurs, called stygimolocks, are engaged in battle on the stream bank over a female, who waits in the woods beyond. Hadrosaurs on a far stream bank sing to one another as the stygimolocks shriek and grapple. A tyrannosaurus rex appears, cracking limbs and branches as it progresses through the forest, painted into the background mural opposite the fighting dinosaurs. Small mammals have appeared by this time, and we can hear them calling and rustling in the leaves all around us.

The creekbed envoronment leads the way to the great hall where the dinosaur skeletons in the museums collection have been painstakingly mounted, many in new ways based on current paleontological research.

By the time we reach the next environment, we have come much further up in time. The dinosaurs are long extinct, and mammals now proliferate. Primates have appeared, and birds, and scores of other animals which bear a strange resemblance to what we know in the modern day. We walk into the great open woodland of Nebraska, 15 million years ago. A hot, eerie tension fills the room. It is the heat of the day. We find we have walked right between a humongous six foot tall wild pig and his prey, a small group of little deer like animals, the ancestors of todays camels. Thunderstorms loom nearby, migrating geese fly overhead, and small insects chirp away in the long grass as the giant pig vocalizes his hunger in a deep tone.

The remainder of the exhibit brings us through the beginnings of humans, and up to the present day. The final display is actually a window into the room where fossil preparators unearth secrets of history locked into slabs of marble and sandstone. 

Jeremiah Lyman Moore     http://www.babyjane.com/timeweb/